You Don’t Need to Track Everything: Choosing What to Stop Collecting

It’s easy to keep adding questions to a form or columns to a spreadsheet. Someone needs information for a grant report, a new program starts, or a question comes up that would be helpful to answer.

Those can all be good reasons to collect something. But when the grant ends or the program changes, the fields often stay. Staff keep filling them in, even when nobody is sure whether the information is still being used.

If you’re trying to make reporting more manageable, I’d start by looking at what you’re asking people to collect. You may find that some of it doesn’t need to be collected anymore.

Look at the work behind each field

Adding a question to a form might only take a minute. Answering it, keeping the information current, and fixing it when something is wrong takes more time.

Someone has to explain what the question means. Someone follows up when it’s left blank. Later, someone preparing a report has to figure out why the answers aren’t consistent.

There’s also the person completing the form. If a participant has already provided the same information to another program in your organization, being asked for it again can be frustrating.

For example, say your intake form asks for an employer’s name. If you help participants find or keep a job, you may need that information. But if nobody uses it to provide services or prepare a report, staff could be spending time collecting and updating something you don’t actually need.

Before trying to make that process faster, I’d check whether it needs to happen at all.

Start with one form or spreadsheet

You don’t need to review every system at once. Pick an intake form, participant survey, or spreadsheet your team uses regularly. Go through it with someone who enters the information and someone who uses it.

For each field, ask:

• What do we use this for?
• Who needs it?
• Is it required for a grant, service, or other obligation?
• Do we already have it somewhere else?
• Do we need to collect it this often?
• What would we lose if we stopped collecting it?

Try to get specific answers. “It’s for reporting” doesn’t tell you much. “We use it to report participation by county for this grant” gives you something you can verify.

If nobody knows why a field is there, that’s a reason to investigate. It doesn’t automatically mean you should remove it. Someone may use it for an annual report that the rest of the team never sees.

Decide what to keep, change, or stop collecting

Some information will clearly need to stay. It supports your services, determines eligibility, meets a reporting requirement, or helps you understand whether a program is working.

Other information may still be useful, but you could collect it differently.

If you only report age groups, check whether you need an exact birth date for anything else. If you ask returning participants to complete the same information every time, consider whether they could just confirm what has changed. If staff enter the same value in two systems, look at whether it can be brought over from the original source.

Then there are fields that no longer have a clear use. Maybe a question was added for a pilot that ended two years ago. Maybe a spreadsheet still includes columns for a report you no longer produce.

Those are good candidates to stop collecting, once you’ve confirmed that nothing still depends on them.

I’d also take a closer look at anything collected “just in case.” Sometimes you do need to gather information now to answer a question later, especially when you’re evaluating a program over time. But you should be able to explain what that question is and how you expect to use the information.

Check before you remove anything

A field can look unused and still be part of a calculation, an automated process, or a report that only runs once a year. Check those connections and confirm any requirements with the person responsible before making a change.

Stopping collection also doesn’t mean deleting the information you already have. Historical records may still be needed for comparisons, reporting, or retention requirements.

Keep a simple note of what changed, when, and why. If you stop asking a question in June, the person preparing the year-end report needs to know why it’s blank for everyone who enrolled after that.

Update the instructions staff use, too. Otherwise, you could remove a field from the form while someone keeps tracking it in a separate spreadsheet because they think it’s still required.

Ask why you need a new field

Once you’ve reviewed what you collect, apply the same questions when someone wants to add something.

What will we use it for? Who will use it? How much detail do we need?

For example, “We need to know who needs transportation so we can arrange rides” gives you a clear reason to ask. “It would be interesting to know more about our participants” needs a little more discussion before it becomes five new intake questions.

If a field is being added for a temporary project, set a time to review it when the project ends. That makes it less likely to stay on the form simply because nobody remembered to take it off.

Make a few useful changes first

I’d start with one form that staff already find frustrating. Ask which questions are difficult to explain, which answers they repeatedly have to chase down, and which information they’re entering more than once.

You might find a few fields you can remove. You might find that the questions are useful but the instructions need work. Either way, you’ll have a better understanding of what you’re asking your team and participants to do.

You don’t have to fix everything at once. Making one regularly used form easier to complete is a useful place to start.

If you’re unsure which information your team still needs, I can help you work through how it’s being used and where you could simplify things. Get in touch with Borrowed BI.